Greta Thunberg, in a video posted on social media, said she and other members of the Freedom flotilla en-route to Gaza have been kidnapped by Israeli forces. This comes after the Daily Mail reported that several Israeli vessels surrounded the ship Madleen, prompting the crew to raise an alarm.
Thunberg shared a pre-recorded video appealing for international help. “My name is Greta Thunberg, and I am from Sweden,” she said in the clip. “If you see this video, we are being intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces, or forces that support Israel. I urge all my friends, family and comrades to put pressure on the Swedish government to release me and the others as soon as possible.”
Do you mean governments or people?
People don’t have much power here. Other than boycotts, what can people do?
For governments, Israel is fairly powerful. They have powerful lobbyists, and aren’t shy to leverage claims of antisemitism against anybody who speaks up against Israel. In many cases, there’s also the guilt over how jews were treated in WWII. This is one reason Germany is so incredibly pro-Israel. Then there’s the fact that Israel is still more-or-less a democracy, which makes it unique in the middle east. It’s the one country in the region pushing back against various Islamic fundamentalist goverments, movements and terrorist groups. Many countries don’t want to lose that “friend”.
And then there’s spyware. Most of the best spyware in the world is produced in Israel. Some cynical people would say that countries don’t want to lose access to the world’s best producer of spyware. Some even more cynical people would say that that spyware has already been used on politicians and Israel is using it for blackmail. Who knows what the right level of cynicism is.
How many are still alive? That excuse has long expired.
You can thank the CIA for that.
It’s not individual guilt, it’s institutional guilt. In many other cases that’s a good thing. We want German kids to grow up learning about the holocaust and thinking “we can’t allow that to ever happen again”. I don’t think what’s happening in Gaza could happen in Germany because of what Germans are taught growing up.
OTOH, in Israel they seem to only be taught that jews are victims and can never be perpetrators.
Yeah, they were involved. They were saving the world from the dangers of communism. Looking back, all the west really had to do was sit back and wait for the communist system to collapse. But, I wonder what the middle east would look like without the CIA’s interference. It sure seems unlikely it would be a land of healthy, stable democracies. Look at all the places where the CIA didn’t interfere. Countries ruled by strongmen is the rule rather than the exception.
But, however we got here, that has been Israel’s traditional role. It was a democratic country with somewhat similar values to the west, nestled among Islamic Arab countries with very different values.
I think they kind of overdid it 'cos know they activelly defend nazis…
Don’t forget that Epstein was linked to Israel Military intelligence, so there is that…